recursive damnation of the researcher

In three blockquotes and one blog post

1) Painful question:
By sitting all day long to write engaging specific aims. I'm perpetuating a dead science model?

It is reasonable to assume that the best researchers end up being PIs, eventually. Yet in the current system, all their time is consumed in writing grant proposals, and managing their research groups. This is a waste of their potential: they are supposed to be the best researchers available to the community yet they cannot perform any actual bench work!

2) Painful argument:
Yes but if I pass my time with the pipet, I'll never get the manuscript written!

Academic publishing is an odd system — the authors are not paid for their writing, nor are the peer reviewers (they’re just more unpaid academics), and in some fields even the journal editors are unpaid. Sometimes the authors must even pay the publishers. And yet scientific publications are some of the most outrageously expensive pieces of literature you can buy…. As far as I can tell, the money paid for access today serves little significant purpose except to perpetuate dead business models.

3) Painful swearing:
OK, but if I don't publish twice in a year I'll never get the f@#€d tenure!

Research institutions pursuing high-risk research may have to rethink evaluation timelines and the criteria for judging and rewarding performance. Achieving the goals of a transformative research program can take longer than those of an incremental program designed in a more linear way; transformative research can have many false starts and thus a reduced publication rate.